An engrossing and disturbing glimpse into a digital totalitarian future.
In a future world where almost all of humanity is mentally connected by a universal, digital mind/internet, a famous athlete suddenly becomes unlinked and a captive of free-thinking rebels.
Kirchner’s debut SF novel envisions the year 2084. Following a war in which 2 billion people died, humanity adopted the pseudo-utopian solution of universal connectivity to the “Hive” via neural implants. Now, a placid, highly regulated global community of rather shallow citizens enjoys distractions of instant information, entertainment, gossip, sports, and social media. Meanwhile, the surveillance state, aka “Mother,” ruthlessly patrols their thoughts and quietly eliminates any troubling dissent or forbidden subjects (like religion or paperback books). Tommy Pierre Antigakamac—alias “Teepee,” in reference to his Canadian First Nations ancestry—star of American-style football, is one of the Hive’s most avidly followed celebrities. But while indulging in his elitist privilege of hiking and adventuring unattended in the Swiss hinterlands, he becomes disconnected from the Hive. Truly alone for the first time, the athlete is captured by a band of “Ketchen,” off-grid dwellers. At first, the hero is disgusted by their primitive ways and taboo offline ideas, but with time and the hosts’ patient hospitality, Teepee starts to revel in the privileges of privacy and freedom of thought, and he too comes to hate Mother and the dictatorship. Then the rebels invent a method to sabotage the all-seeing Hive, reliant on Teepee’s superior speed and timing. But something isn’t quite right. Readers should spot fairly easily the takeoff on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (a shoutout to Ray Bradbury also conjures that writer’s dystopias). Indeed, much of the engaging story settles into confined debates-cum–brainwash sessions (à laWinston Smith versus O’Brien in Orwell’s classic). These discussions focus on the Hive’s insidious methodology and, at least to the ostensible, surprisingly sympathetic villain of the tale, why such a society became necessary, and perhaps even inevitable, for Earth’s survival. But will the much-abused Teepee carry out the system’s destruction, will he escape somewhere else, or will he repent and learn to love Big Mother? With a brief page count and consistent intelligence, Kirchner’s novel may not reinvent the dystopian future cautionary tale, but it renders an effective update/upgrade for the age of the smartphone. His portrayal of a surveillance state is as disquieting as Orwell’s vision in the analog era.
An engrossing and disturbing glimpse into a digital totalitarian future.Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-52-559608-7
Page Count: 204
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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